Warner Bros. Will Release Tom Cruise Time-Bender 'All You Need Is Kill' In March 2014

Looks like Warner Bros. is really going to keep the title All You Need is Kill for the Doug Liman-directed sci-fi thriller starring Tom Cruise as a soldier who is killed during his first few minutes of battle, but finds himself reliving his last day over and over again. The common description for the film has been Groundhog Day meets Starship Troopers, and though the script went through some rewrites to accommodate Cruise, that core idea remains the same. Sounds like Cruise starts off as an inexperienced officer (think Lt. Gorman, from Aliens) but becomes a hardened battle vet thanks to his looped final day.

Warner Bros. has now set a March 14, 2013 release date for the film, and we've got an updated synopsis and cast list below.

Here's the long synopsis:

The story unfolds in a near future in which a hive-like alien race, called Mimics, have hit the Earth in an unrelenting assault, shredding great cities to rubble and leaving millions of human casualties in their wake. No army in the world can match the speed, brutality or seeming prescience of the weaponized Mimic fighters or their telepathic commanders. But now the world's armies have joined forces for a last stand offensive against the alien horde, with no second chances.

Lt. Col. Bill Cage (Cruise) is an officer who has never seen a day of combat when he is unceremoniously demoted and then dropped—untrained and ill-equipped—into what amounts to little more than a suicide mission. Cage is killed within minutes, managing to take an Alpha down with him. But, impossibly, he awakens back at the beginning of the same hellish day, and is forced to fight and die again...and again. Direct physical contact with the alien has thrown him into a time loop—dooming him to live out the same brutal combat over and over.

But with each pass, Cage becomes tougher, smarter, and able to engage the Mimics with increasing skill, alongside Special Forces warrior Rita Vrataski (Blunt), who has lain waste to more Mimics than anyone on Earth. As Cage and Rita take the fight to the aliens, each repeated battle becomes an opportunity to find the key to annihilating the alien invaders and saving the Earth.

The rest of the press release offers up some useful details, with confirmation of the cast as Cruise and Emily Blunt are joined by Bill Paxton, Jonas Armstrong (BBC TV's Robin Hood), Tony Way (Game of Thrones), Kick Gurry (Australian TV's Tangle), Franz Drameh (Attack the Block), Dragomir Mrsic (Snabba Cash II), and Charlotte Riley (World Without End).

Script credits go to Dante Harper, Christopher McQuarrie and Joby Harold, based on the novel All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka.

I really enjoyed one version of this script, as it had a video game approach to the looped day concept that worked really well on the page; I'm very curious to see how Liman manages to put it on film.